November 15, 2009 Des Moines

TEXT: 1 Samuel 1:4-20

Prayerfully Troubled

Ah! So this is the “biblical model of marriage” we've been hearing so much about in recent years: one man and two women who can't get along. Sounds like bliss to me, but it will require changing a few laws to make possible.

On a more serious note, this story has been quite a wrestling match for me this week – how to get inside of it; what’s the Good News it has to share. On the surface it looks pretty obvious: God answering the prayers of this desperate woman. But do I really want to preach a sermon about bargaining with God to get what you want? After all, who hasn’t pleaded with God and negotiated like Hannah, but NOT what we hoped for? It isn’t quite that simple, is it? As I say, this story has remained just beyond my reach.

And then I realized why. If, as author John Gray suggests, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, then this is a “Venusian” kind of story, not readily accessible to Martians like myself. I don’t say this just because the main character is a woman. Look at the dynamic of the interactions:

· For starters, it is a story rife with emotion, centered in the heart, and that alone is enough to disconnect it from most men who tend to be stuck in our heads.

· On more serious notes, Hannah, the protagonist of the story, like young girls today studying the models in fashion magazines, is tormented by the fact that she can’t measure up to the popular standard for what is considered “valuable” in her culture, and takes out her pain and grief on her own body.

· Moreover, she is married to a guy who doesn’t understand her, tries to minimize her feelings, and who instead of telling Hannah how much she means to him, focuses his concern exclusively on clarifying how much he ought to mean to her. (Sort of a variation on the old, “OK, enough about me. Let’s talk about you. What do you think about me?”) He probably won’t stop and ask for directions when he’s lost, either.

· Finally, Eli, the other male figure in the story – and the equivalent of a clergyman in his day who ought to be sensitive to the spiritually troubled – functions first of all more like a houseplant than a pastor. And when he does finally snap to attention, he completely misreads the spiritual passion of this woman who has sidestepped him in order to get close to God and all but calls the Police to have the drunkard thrown out. Why is it, I wonder, that spiritual fervor so often in scripture gets confused with drunkenness? When Hannah rather forcefully sets him straight, the most he can do is offer the pastoral equivalent of “Well, I hope it works out for you.”

And there you have the situation: a distraught and heartsick woman pinballing between two men who don’t understand her, and a rival who just doesn’t like her. No wonder that, with a story as compelling as this one clicking along in the foreground, it’s easy to miss altogether the much larger story line paralleling this one on the tracks just behind the tree line.

While here, in the foreground, is a woman feeling anxious over having no children despite Elkanah’s love for her, in the background is the nation of Israel, anxious because it has no king despite the love of God. While here in the foreground is a woman taunted by another described as her rival, in the background is the nation of Israel, taunted by her neighboring rival nations. While here, in the foreground, is the eventual granting of a son – but only with conditions – in the background is the eventual granting of a similarly conditional King.

So what is really going on here, and why was this story remembered generation after generation after generation? Is this, in fact, a very personal story about a specific woman and the barrenness she feels, or is it really a representative story about a nation and the barrenness beneath which it was laboring? Or is the similarity between the two stories interesting, but merely coincidental?

Well, you make of it what you wish, but I am pretty quick to dismiss the latter. My sense is that scripture has little interest in “coincidences”, and no interest at all in reporting them. All the while, the Bible displays quite a fondness for metaphors, analogies, and teaching opportunities. And if Hannah and Israel happen to both be feeling a barrenness beyond simple comforting, then perhaps both have something to learn about the fertile possibilities of God.

Every so often in our lives we are confronted with what we might call spiritual “gut check” moments – turning-point times when we are forced to confront the assertions of our faith and either dismiss them as wistfully attractive but ultimately hollow platitudes, or claim them as load-bearing walls of our comprehension of the ways of God in this world and in our lives. There are plenty of times, for example – typically when consoling the griefs of other people – when it’s easy to toss off Paul’s conviction that “all things work together for good for those who love the Lord.” But there are those other times, however – when the state trooper calls your telephone number; or when the dreaded diagnosis you are hearing is your own; or when the pink slip lands in your box; or when the promotion goes to another; or when the chasmic cemetery hole in front of you contains your spouse; or when “writer’s block” has no regard for the deadline bearing down on you; or when they are your aspirations that are generating only barrenness – when you are left to plumb the deepest recesses of your soul to determine if you really believe such a promise that all things really do work together for good…

Or, it doesn’t take very much effort at all to read Jesus’ assurance to his disciples that “I will not leave you comfortless or alone.” But there are those times, suffocating in the airless ache of loneliness, when we stare into the face of what that might mean.

Or this faith claim that Hannah finds herself bumping into in the story at hand: that there is no emptiness so empty that God cannot fill it.

They are not easy or comfortable moments, but they are precisely the intersections at which we discover and ultimately reveal who we are, what gives us depth and dimension, what the sieves are through which we will pour our experiences in search of meaning, and upon which unconfirmable propositions we will stake our lives.

Having come to such an intersection, herself, this day, and fully taken its measure, Hannah stepped back over the platitudes of the priest, left the sanctuary and returned home, the torment finally stilled. She still had the jeers and the taunts of her rival to endure – at least for a time – but having begun this episode prayerfully troubled, she ended it confidently at peace…

…trusting what she could not know…

…believing what she could not see…

…blessedly sure that God had not forsaken her after all.